With the emergence of digital television, there has been an effort to develop standards for the broadcast and reception of digital video signals. One such effort is the digital video broadcasting project (DVB) which is a consortium developing standards for television and data services. The DVB project is discussed in detail on the internet at www.dvb.org.
One of the standards being developed by the DVB project is referred to as digital video broadcast-terrestrial (DVB-T). According to the DVB-T standard, hierarchical modulation is used to provide two separate data streams: a high priority stream and a low priority stream. One of the factors in determining whether the low priority stream can be received is the quality of the signal provided to the receiver.
It is known that handheld devices, such as cellular radiotelephones, may have difficulty in providing services via DVB-T type digital video signals because of the power limitations of such devices. In other words, it is known that receivers that comply with the DVB-T standard may consume more power than may easily be provided by cellular radiotelephones. Accordingly, the DVB project developed and promulgated the DVB-Handheld (DVB-H) standard which focuses on reducing the power otherwise required for receivers to process DVB compliant signals. In brief, the DVB-H standard includes variations from the DVB-T standard, such as time slicing and forward error correction to reduce the power requirements of such mobile devices. Notwithstanding the reduced power requirements provided by DVB-H, compliance with the DVB standards discussed above may still require adequate reception of signal to utilize the relatively low priority (i.e., higher bit rate) data streams.